Amazon on Thursday announced seven new hardware products from its Fire lineup of tablets and streaming TV accessories, including an entry-level tablet that costs just $49.99, and a new $99.99 Fire TV with support for 4K video content.

As a part of Prime Day, an attempt to spur Black Friday-level sales from Prime subscribers, Amazon on Wednesday discounted a number of electronics, including several Kindle readers and Kindle Fire touchscreen tablets.

The worldwide tablet market saw its first-ever year-over-year decline in the holiday quarter, but the biggest losses were seen by Amazon, which saw shipments of its budget-priced Kindle Fire series plummet 70 percent.

The rate of device activations for Apple more than doubled on Christmas Day this year, though the real winner was Amazon, whose low-margin Kindle devices saw a 24-fold surge in new devices for the single day.

Apple's iOS platform is widely considered to have the best mobile application ecosystem, and a new analysis of the App Store comparing it to Google Play for Android and the Amazon Appstore for Kindle Fire supports the notion that Apple remains head and shoulders above the competition.

In response to Apple's new iPads, Amazon took a direct shot at its competitor on the front page of its website Wednesday, saying the Kindle Fire HDX is "lighter than Air" -- even though the new Kindle achieves that weight with a smaller display.

Online retail giant Amazon quietly unveiled new versions of its Kindle Fire line of devices this week, showing off a tweaked form factor and a novel on-screen helpdesk feature that could differentiate the company's lineup from Android tablets and Apple's iPad.

In recent weeks, Amazon has held a number of sales on its Kindle Fire lineup, and on Thursday the company's refurbished 8.9-inch model was discounted by $60, as the online retailer continues its efforts to carve away market share from Apple's iPad.

While Barnes & Noble hoped its custom-built Nook tablet could compete with the likes of Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle Fire, continued losses for the bookseller have forced it to exit the hardware manufacturing business, leaving third-party partners to build future Nook devices.

Despite growing competition from other tablets, Apple's iPad still accounts for a whopping 89.28 percent of e-commerce website traffic, and also rakes in more money on a per-user basis than any other platform.

Amazon on Monday celebrated the launch of its new Amazon Coins by giving “tens of millions of dollars” of the virtual currency to Kindle Fire users as part of its latest bit to attract customers to its own Kindle platform, and away from incumbents like Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

A new report claims Amazon may be looking to attack the very low end of the tablet market with a $99 version of its Kindle Fire tablet, though a spokesperson for the online retailer has characterized the rumor as inaccurate.

The launch of Apple's iPad mini appears to have slowed the rate at which competitors have been able to eat into the company's overwhelming lead in the tablet sector, according to a new study out Thursday, even as Amazon and Samsung tablets continue to carve out their own share.

Apple has introduced a new billboard ad campaign touting not just the iPad and iPad mini, but drawing particular attention to their shared library of 300,000 apps, a notable departure from the ads of Samsung and other tablet vendors.

Amazon's Kindle Fire — and, to a lesser extent, Android tablets — saw continued usage share growth after the holidays, according to a new report, but Apple's iPads remained the overwhelming tablet leader, with more than 80 percent of active users in the market.